How in the world can these stupid electronic telephone messages voicing support for a particular candidate be effective in anything but antagonizing the electorate??? I hang up after I hear a "canned/recorded" voice staring the spiel. It's a waste of my time to answer the phone & a waste of voice mail recording space if no one is home.

I agree with Jeff. Those ads are not anything but harassment of the people that those idiot politicians are supposed to be working for. A few years ago the Wisconsin legislature enacted the "Telephone Solicitations" s.100.52 and other statutes that included the "No Call List." Wonderful....but conveniently excluded themselves and other politicos from the regulations. You can tell where the special interest moneys are flowing by the number of recorded messages from the candidate's solicitors. Hillary and Obama won the "Telephone Solicitations Pole" at my house this year. Perhaps the voters should withhold payments for their phone service in the month proceeding elections. That would only happen once and Verizon would figure a way to stop that stuff.

Personally I don't feel that automated phone ads are very effective. A real pain too.

The thought that has crossed my mind is, what a hay day the political cartoonist will have with Obama's ears if he's elected. I'm sure they have already, I don't get a daily paper to see that sort of stuff.

The cartoonists will just use the ears they've been using for George Bush for the last 7 years.

Concerning the phone ads...my guess is that, like pop-up ads on your browser that we all hate, the ad people hope that they might catch a couple extra votes for their candidate or issue that otherwise they wouldn't. At the same time they gamble that we won't vote the opposite just because the phone ads are so annoying.

These days it seems that every vote really does count. In some cases elections have been decided by a single digit margin.

Good point Tooten! I hadn't thought about that. It is very interesting that they excluded their interests from the "Do Not Call Legislation".

Some of our politicians are cut from the same branch as the people that ran our Student Councils while we were in high school. What did you think of them back then? Would you buy a used car from one of them?

Funny, I think they were all teacher's kids at my High School. I thought they were just fishin' for scholarships, but maybe some of them did grow up to be used car salesmen or perhaps telephone solicitors. One never knows.